From Nell Freudenberger, one of America's most dazzling talents, comes an utterly
captivating cross-continental love story
This is a novel about a marriage made online. Amina Mazid is twenty-four when she leaves
Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed
her through AsianEuro.com. It's a twenty-first-century romance that echoes ancient
traditions - the arranged marriages of her home country. And though George falls for Amina
because she doesn't "play games," each is hiding something from the other. Amina struggles
to find her place in America - as a Muslim woman, an aspiring teacher, a wife with her own
desires. But it is only when they put an ocean between them that Amina and George will
discover whether they have a future - or if their secrets will tear them apart. Travelling
from the American suburbs to the cities of South Asia, The Newlyweds is a tour de
force - a novel as rich with misunderstandings as it is with unlikely connections.
NELL FREUDENBERGER is the author of the novel The Dissident, (longlisted for the
Orange Prize) and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award
and shortlisted for the Orange New Writers' Prize and a New York Times Book Review
Notable Book. She was named a New Yorker '20 Under 40' writer and one of Granta's
Best Young American Novelists. She has lived and taught in Bangkok and New Delhi and now
lives in Brooklyn, New York.
An Arranged Marriage
1
She hadn’t heard the mailman, but Amina decided to go out and
check. Just in case. If anyone saw her, they would know that there
was someone in the house now during the day while George was at
work. They would watch Amina hurrying coatless to the mailbox,
still wearing her bedroom slippers, and would conclude that this was
her home. She had come to stay.
The mailbox was new. She had ordered it herself with George’s
credit card, from mailboxes.com, and she had not chosen the cheapest
one. George had said that they needed something sturdy, and so
Amina had turned off the Deshi part of her brain and ordered the
heavy- duty rural model, in glossy black, for $90. She had not done
the conversion into taka, and when it arrived, wrapped in plastic, surrounded
by Styrofoam chips, and carefully tucked into its corrugated
cardboard box— a box that most Americans would simply throw away
but that Amina could not help storing in the basement, in a growing
pile behind George’s Bowfl ex— she had taken pleasure in its size and
solidity. She showed George the detachable red fl ag that you could
move up or down to indicate whether you had letters for collection.
“That wasn’t even in the picture,” she told him. “It just came with
it, free.”
The old mailbox had been bashed in by thugs. The fi rst time had
been right after Amina arrived from Bangladesh, one Thursday night
in March. George had left for work on Friday morning, but he hadn’t
gotten even as far as his car when he came back through the kitchen
door, uncharacteristically furious.
“Goddamn thugs. Potheads. Smoking weed and destroying private
property. And the police don’t do a fucking thing.”
“Thugs are here? In Pittsford?” She couldn’t understand it, and that
made him angrier.
“Thugs! Vandals. Hooligans— whatever you want to call them.
Uneducated pieces of human garbage.” Then he went down to the
basement to get his tools, because you had to take the mailbox off
its post and repair the damage right away. If the thugs saw that you
hadn’t fixed it, that was an invitation.
The flag was still raised, and when she double- checked, sticking
her hand all the way into its black depths, there was only the stack of
bills George had left on his way to work. The thugs did not actually
steal the mail, and so her green card, which was supposed to arrive
this month, would have been safe even if she could have forgotten to
check. “Thugs” had a different meaning in America, and that was why
she’d been confused. George had been talking about kids, troublemakers
from East Rochester High, while Amina had been thinking of
dacoits: bandits who haunted the highways and made it unsafe to take
the bus. She had lived in Rochester six months now— long enough to
know that there were no bandits on Pittsford roads at night.
American English was different from the language she’d learned at
Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George
corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes.
Americans always went to the bathroom, never the loo. They did not
live in fl ats or stow anything in the boot of the car, and under no circumstances
did they ever pop outside to smoke a fag.
Maple Leaf was where she first learned to use the computer, and
the computer was how she met George, a thirty- four- year-old SWM
who was looking for a wife. George had explained to her that he had
always wanted to get married. He had dated women in Rochester, but
often found them silly, and had such a strong aversion to perfume that
he couldn’t sit across the table from a woman who was wearing it.
George’s cousin Kim had called him “picky,” and had suggested that
he might have better luck on the Internet, where he could clarify his
requirements from the beginning.
George told Amina that he had been waiting for a special connection.
He was a romantic, and he didn’t want to compromise on just
anyone. It wasn’t until his colleague Ed told him that he’d met his
wife, Min, on AsianEuro.com that he had thought of trying that particular site. When he had received the fi rst e- mail from Amina, he
said that he’d “had a feeling.” When Amina asked what had given him
the feeling, he said that she was “straightforward” and that she did
not play games, unlike some women he knew. Which women were
those, she had asked, but George said he was talking about women
he’d known a long time ago, when he was in college.
She hadn’t been testing him: she had really wanted to know, only
because her own experience had been so different. She had been
contacted by several men before George, and each time she’d wondered
if this was the person she would marry. Once she and George
had started e- mailing each other exclusively, she had wondered the
same thing about him, and she’d continued wondering even after he
booked the flight to Dhaka in order to meet her. She had wondered
that first night when he ate with her parents at the wobbly table covered
by the plasticized map of the world— which her father discreetly
steadied by placing his elbow somewhere in the neighborhood of
Sudan— and during the agonizing hours they had spent in the homes
of their Dhaka friends and relatives, talking to each other in English
while everyone sat around them and watched. It wasn’t until she was
actually on the plane to Washington, D.C., wearing the University of
Rochester sweatshirt he’d given her, that she had finally become convinced
it was going to happen.
It was the first week of September, but the leaves were already
starting to turn yellow. George said that the fall was coming early,
making up for the fact that last spring had been unusually warm: a
gift to Amina from the year 2005— her first in America. By the time
she arrived in March most of the snow was gone, and so she had not
yet experienced a real Rochester winter.
In those first weeks she had been pleased to notice that her husband
had a large collection of books: biographies (Abraham Lincoln,
Anne Frank, Cary Grant, Mary Queen of Scots, John Lennon, and
Napoléon) as well as classic novels by Charles Dickens, Cervantes, Tolstoy,
Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Austen. George told Amina that
he was a reader but that he couldn’t understand people who waded
through all of the garbage they published these days, when it was possible
to spend your whole life reading books the greatness of which
had already been established.
George did have some books from his childhood, when he’d been
interested in fantasy novels, especially retellings of the Arthurian
legend and anything to do with dragons. There was also a book his
mother had given him, 1001 Facts for Kids, which he claimed had “basically
got him through the stupidity of elementary school.” In high
school he had put away the 1001 Facts in favor of a game called Dungeons
& Dragons, but there were now websites that served the same
purpose, and George retained a storehouse of interesting tidbits that
he periodically related to Amina.
“Did you know that there is an actual society made up of people
who believe the earth is flat?”
“Did you know that one out of twenty people has an extra rib?”
“Did you know that most lipstick contains fish scales?”
For several weeks Amina had answered “No” to each of these
questions, until she gradually understood that this was another
colloquialism— perhaps more typical of her husband than of the
English language— simply a way of introducing a new subject that did
not demand an actual response.
“Did you know that seventy percent of men and sixty percent of
women admit to having been unfaithful to their spouse, but that
eighty percent of men say they would marry the same woman if they
had the chance to live their lives over again?”
“What do the women say?” Amina had asked, but George’s website
hadn’t cited that statistic.
George had said that they could use the money he’d been saving
for a rainy day for her to begin studying at Monroe Community College
next year, and as soon as her green card arrived, Amina planned
to start looking for a job. She wanted to contribute to the cost of her
education, even if it was just a small amount. George supported the
idea of her continuing her studies, but only once she had a specific
goal in mind. It wasn’t the degree that counted but what you did with
it; he believed that too many Americans wasted time and money on
college simply for the sake of a fancy piece of paper. And so Amina
told him that she’d always dreamed of becoming a real teacher. This
was not untrue, in the sense that she had hoped her tutoring jobs at
home might one day lead to a more sustained and distinguished kind
of work. What she didn’t mention to George was how important the
U.S. college diploma would be to everyone she knew at home— a tangible
symbol of what she had accomplished halfway across the world.
She was standing at the sink, chopping eggplant for dinner, when
she saw their neighbor Annie Snyder coming up Skytop Lane, pushing
an infant in a stroller and talking to her little boy, Lawson, who
was pedaling a low plastic bike. The garish colors and balloon- like
shapes of that toy reminded Amina of a commercial she had seen
on TV soon after she’d arrived in Rochester, in which real people
were eating breakfast in a cartoon house. Annie had introduced herself
when Amina had moved in and invited her out for coffee. Then
she’d asked if Amina had any babysitting experience, because she
was always looking for someone to watch the kids for an hour or two
while she did the shopping or went to the gym.
She asks that because you’re from someplace else, George had said.
She sees brown skin and all she can think of is housecleaning or babysitting.
He told her she was welcome to go to Starbucks with Annie,
but under no circumstances was she to take care of Annie’s children,
even for an hour. Amina was desperate to find a job, but secretly she
was glad of George’s prohibition. American babies made her nervous,
the way they traveled in their padded strollers, wrapped up in blankets
like precious goods from UPS.
She had never worried about motherhood before, since she’d always
known she would have her own mother to help her. When she and
George had become serious, Amina and her parents had decided that
she would do everything she could to bring them to America with
her. Only once they’d arrived did she want to have her fi rst child.
They’d talked their plan through again and again at home, researching
the green card and citizenship requirements— determining that if
all went well, it would be three years from the time she arrived before
her parents could hope to join her. Just before she left, her cousin
Ghaniyah had shown her an article in Femina called “After the Honeymoon,”
which said that a couple remained newlyweds for a year
and a day after marriage. In her case, Amina thought, the newlywed
period would last three times that long, because she wouldn’t feel
truly settled until her parents had arrived.
In spite of all the preparation, there was something surprising
about actually finding herself in Rochester, waiting for a green card
in the mail. The sight of Annie squatting down and retrieving something
from the netting underneath the stroller reminded her that she
had been here six months already and had not yet found an opportunity
to discuss her thoughts about children or her parents’ emigration
with George.
2
Theirs was the second- to- last house on the road. The road
ended in an asphalt circle called a cul- de- sac, and beyond the
cul- de- sac was a field of corn. That field had startled Amina when she
first arrived— had made her wonder, just for a moment, if she had not
been tricked (as everyone had predicted) and found herself in a sort of
American village. She’d had to remind herself of the clean and modern
Rochester airport and of the Pittsford Wegmans— a grocery store
that was the first thing she described to her mother during their first
conversation on the phone. When she asked about the field, George
had explained that there were power lines that couldn’t be moved,
and so no one could build a house there.
After she understood its purpose, Amina liked the cornfield, which
reminded her of Haibatpur, her grandmother’s village. She had been
born there. That was when the house was still a hut, with a thatched
roof and a fired- dung floor. After she was born, when her parents
were struggling to feed even themselves in Dhaka, they had done as
many people did and sent their child back to live with her grandparents
in the village. Because of a land dispute between Amina’s father
and his cousins, it was her mother’s village to which they habitually
returned. And so Amina had stayed with Nanu and her Parveen
Aunty and Parveen’s daughter— her favorite cousin, Micki— until she
was six years old. Her first memory was of climbing up the stone steps
from the pond with her hand in Nanu’s, watching a funny pattern of
light and dark splotches turn into a frog, holding still in the ragged
shade of a coconut palm.
Her nanu had had four daughters and two sons, but both of Amina’s
uncles had died too young for Amina to remember them. The elder,
Khokon, had been Mukti Bahini like her father, a Freedom Fighter
against the Pakistanis, while the younger one, Emdad, had stayed in
the village so that her grandmother wouldn’t worry too much. Even
though he was younger, it was Emdad her grandmother loved the
best: that was why she’d kept him with her. When you tried to trick
God that way, bad things could happen. Khokon had been killed
by General Yahya’s soldiers only two weeks after he’d enlisted, but
Emdad had lived long enough to marry. Her mother said that Nanu
had often congratulated herself on her foresight in convincing Emdad
to stay at home, and so it had been almost impossible for her to believe
the news, ten years after the war had ended, that her younger son
had been killed in a motorbike accident on his way to Shyamnagar,
delivering prescription medicines to the family pharmacy. For months
afterward, whenever people offered condolences, her grandmother
would correct them:
“You’re thinking of Khokon, my elder son. He was killed in the
war.”
By the time Amina was grown up, her grandmother had recovered
her wits. But by then she had only daughters, and that was the reason
she’d become the way she was now, very quiet and heavy, like a stone.
Little by little, over the eleven months they had written to each
other, Amina had told George about her life. She’d said that she came
from a good family and that her parents had sacrifi ced to send her to
an English medium school, but she had not exaggerated her father’s
financial situation or the extent of her formal education. She’d said
that she had learned to speak English at Maple Leaf International in
Dhaka but that she’d been forced to drop out when she was thirteen,
when her father could no longer pay the fees. She’d tried to explain
that it wasn’t arriving in a rickshaw every day, when everyone else
came by car or taxi, or borrowing the books other girls owned, or
even working twice as hard because everyone else had a private tutor
after school. What she couldn’t stand, she wrote to George, was having
to leave school a few months after her thirteenth birthday, waking
up in the morning and knowing that today she was falling six
hours behind, tomorrow twelve, and the next day eighteen. What she
couldn’t stand was all the waste.
She’d also confessed that she was twenty- four rather than
twenty- three that year: her parents had waited to fi e her birth certificate, as many families did, so that she might one day have extra time
to qualify for university or the civil- service exam. Her mother had warned her to be careful about what she revealed in her e- mails, but
Amina found that once she got started writing, it was difficult to stop.
She told George how her father’s business plans had a tendency to
fail, and how each time one of those schemes had foundered, they had
lost their apartment. She told him about the year they had spent living
in Tejgaon, after losing the apartment in the building called Moti
Mahal, and how during that time her father had bought a single egg
every day, which her mother would cook for her because Amina was
still growing and needed the protein. One night, when she had tried
to share the egg with her parents, dividing it up into three parts, her
father had gotten so angry that he had tried to beat her (with a jump
rope) and would have succeeded if her mother hadn’t come after him
with the broken handle of a chicken- feather broom.
Sometimes she got so involved in remembering what had happened
that she forgot about the reader on the other end, and so she was surprised
when George wrote back to tell her that her story had made
him cry. He could not remember crying since his hamster had died
in the second grade, and he thought that it meant their connection
was getting stronger. Amina wrote back immediately to apologize
for making George cry and to explain that it was not a sad story but
a funny one, about her parents and the silly fi ghts they sometimes
had. Even if she and George didn’t always understand each other, she
never felt shy about asking him questions. What level did the American
second grade correspond to in the British system? What had he
eaten for dinner as a child? And what, she was very curious to know,
was a hamster?
It had felt wonderful to have someone to confide in, someone she
could trust not to gossip. (With whom could George gossip about
Amina, after all?) It was a pleasure to write about diffi cult times
in the past, as long as things were better now. By the time she and
George started writing to each other, Amina was supporting her parents
with the money she made from her tutoring jobs through Top
Talents; they were living in the apartment in Mohammadpur, and of
course they had plenty to eat. She still thought the proudest moment
of her life had come when she was seventeen and had returned home
one day to surprise her parents with a television bought entirely out
of her own earnings.
The other benefit of tutoring, one she hadn’t considered when she
started out, was the use of the computers that many of the wealthy
families who hired her kept for their children’s exclusive use. All of
her students were female, and most of them were between eight and
fourteen years old; as they got closer to the O- or A- level exams, their
parents hired university students to prepare them. Many of these parents
told Amina that they’d chosen her because they’d been impressed
by her dedication in passing the O levels on her own, but of course
Amina knew that Top Talents charged less for her than they did for an
actual university student.
Amina had seen one of her students, a fourteen- year- old named
Sharmila, three times a week; since her parents both had office jobs,
they liked Amina to stay as long as she wanted so that their daughter
wasn’t just sitting around with the servants all afternoon. Her
mother confided that she thought Amina would be a good influence
on her daughter’s character; Sharmila was very intelligent, but easily
distracted, and was not serious enough about saying her prayers. She
has been raised with everything, her mother said, her arm taking in the
marble fl oors of the living room and the heavy brocade curtains on
the six picture windows overlooking the black surface of Gulshan
Lake, which was revealed, even at this height, to be clogged with
garbage, water lilies, and the shanties of migrant families. She doesn’t
even know how lucky she is. Amina nodded politely, but the way that
Sharmila’s mother complained was a performance. She would put on
the same show when her daughter’s marriage was being negotiated,
exaggerating Sharmila’s incompetence with a simple dal or kitchuri,
so that the groom’s family would understand what a little princess
they were about to receive.
Amina had sworn Sharmila to secrecy on the subject of AsianEuro
.com, and then they’d had a lot of fun, looking through the photos in
the “male gallery” after the lessons were finished. Sharmila always
chose the youngest and best- looking men; she would squeal and gasp
when they came across one who was very old or very fat. More often
than not, Amina had the same impulses, but she reminded herself that
she was not a little girl playing a game. She was a twenty- four- year- old
woman whose family’s future depended on this decision.
According to her mother, the man could not have been divorced
and he certainly couldn’t have any children. He had to have a bachelor’s
degree and a dependable job, and he could not drink alcohol.
He could not be younger than thirty or older than forty- fi ve, and he
must be willing to convert to Islam. Her mother had also insisted that
Amina take off her glasses and wear a red sari she had inherited from
her cousin Ghaniyah in the photograph, but once it had been taken
and scanned into the computer (a great inconvenience) at the Internet
café near Aunty #2’s apartment in Savar, her mother would not allow
her to post it online. “Why would you want a man who was only
interested in your photograph?” she demanded, and nothing Amina
could say about the way the site worked would change her mind.
“The men will think you’re ugly!” Sharmila exclaimed when she
heard about Amina’s mother’s stipulations. They were sitting on the
rug in Sharmila’s bedroom at the time, with Sharmila’s Basic English
Grammar open between them. Her student was wearing the kameez
of her school uniform with a pair of pajama trousers decorated with
kittens. She looked Amina up and down critically.
“Your hair is coarse, and you have an apple nose, but you aren’t
ugly,” she concluded. “Now no one is going to write to you.” And
although Amina had the very same fears, she had decided to pretend
to agree with her mother, for the sake of Sharmila’s character.
As it happened, George did not post his picture online either. They
sent each other the photographs only after they had exchanged several
messages. George told her that her picture was “very beautiful,”
in a formal way that pleased her: it was almost as if he were a Bengali
bridegroom surrounded by his relatives, approving of their choice
without wanting to display too much enthusiasm, for fear of being
teased. Months later, once they had decided to become exclusive and
take their profi les down from the site, George told her it was the day
he saw her photograph that he’d become convinced she was the right
person for him— not because of how pretty she was but because she
hadn’t used her “superfi cial charms” to advertise herself, the way certain
American women did.
Their correspondence hadn’t been without its challenges. Normally
she would go to the British Council in the mornings before her tutoring
responsibilities began; since George often wrote to her at night
before he went to bed, there was almost always a message waiting for her. But one afternoon a message had come when she’d happened to
be at the library. It was 4:22 a.m. in Rochester (unlike most people’s,
George’s e- mails always displayed the correct time), and she had been
tempted to IM and say that she was online right at that moment. But
when she’d read the message, she had been relieved she’d waited. She
thought it was doubly disappointing to have gotten a message at a
surprising time and then to have it turn out to be the message it was,
startling in its curt brevity: George had been assigned a big project at
work, he said, and wasn’t sure when he would be able to resume their
correspondence. He hoped she understood and that she and her family
continued to be well.
She had received similar messages before, and it had always
meant that the man had found someone else. She remembered the
way that this particular message, more than any of the others, had
closed down the day— so it seemed as if there would never be anything
to look forward to again. She felt as if she had failed, and when she’d
arrived home and reported what had happened, her mother’s obvious
disappointment had made her own even more difficult to bear. Even
her father had held his tongue and kept himself from gloating about
the unreliability of computerized matchmaking, and so she’d known
he had been hoping this time, too.
It had been ten weeks before George had written to her again.
Much later she’d wondered whether it was this hiatus that had made
her fall in love with him. The message had come at the usual time, but
it was even more unexpected than the last one, since she’d assumed
he would never write again:
Dear Amina,
First, I should apologize for not writing for so long. I wouldn’t blame you
if you’d found someone else, or were even engaged by now. (I wouldn’t
blame you, but I would be very disappointed.) I promised myself I would
write to you tonight and explain, but I’ve been sitting here a long time. I
keep writing things and then deleting them.
It wasn’t only the work, as you probably guessed. I do have a big project
(I’ll tell you about it if you’re still interested), but believe me when I say
I was still thinking about you. My friends have asked how I could be
serious about someone I’ve never even met, but I think in some ways
we know each other better than we would if we just went on dates. Do
you know what I mean? I think I’ve been worried about getting serious
because I thought you might just disappear or stop writing. I know
doing the same thing to you was really stupid, and I’m sorry about that.
I guess what I was thinking before I stopped writing is that I’m falling in
love with you. There— that’s something I wouldn’t have said if we’d been
face- to- face.
Well, Amina, I’m not sure you can forgive me, but I feel better having
written it. How is your grandmother’s health? Is your father working these
days? And what have you been doing for the last two months? If the
answer includes writing to someone else . . . that’s what I get, I guess. I
know I don’t exactly deserve it, but please let me down easy.
Sincerely,
George
She had wondered if she ought to wait a day or so to write back,
and then she had chastised herself for thinking about strategy. George
had said that he liked her because she didn’t play games; she wouldn’t
be like the women he remembered from college. If he liked her, she
wanted it to be for the way she really was, and so she wrote back and
told him that she hadn’t been corresponding with anyone else. She
didn’t say anything about the disappointment (her own, or certainly
her parents’) but simply fi lled him in on the events of the last few
weeks: her father’s temporary employment at a shipping offi ce and
the pain in her grandmother’s knees. Then she had printed out his
note and brought it home like a gift to surprise her parents.